Share this:

A young woman straps a bomb to her body and steps into Times Square, intent on detonating it.

So begins “Day Night Day Night,” winner of the top prize at the Woodstock Film Festival last weekend.

As it happened, the award was announced on the birthday of the thriller’s star, Luisa Williams.

Glowing with delight, Williams (who would not divulge her age) and her director, Julia Loktev, accepted the trophy that night (Oct. 14).

The next day, the movie unreeled in Woodstock’s Tinker Street Theater for an audience that included Williams’ boyfriend and mother.

The slight, dark-haired actress gives a compelling performance as the 19-year-old terrorist, identified only as She. Williams is in nearly every frame, the camera fixated on her face.

Russian-born Loktev said she had auditioned several hundred women – “I wanted a girl you didn’t know” – before discovering Williams, who was working as a nanny.

Said Williams, “Now I really want to be an actress. Now I’m hooked.”

* You will get a chance to question director Gabriel Range about his controversial “Death of a President” when the film unspools Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens; movingimage.us

“Death” is a fictional account of the assassination of President George W. Bush. It has come under heavy criticism, and two of the country’s largest movie chains are refusing to show it.

* On the DVD front, there’s “Who Wants to Kill Jessie?” (1965), a sci-fi comedy (in black and white) from Czechoslovakia in which comic-strip characters come to life – and can’t be killed. Note the unforeseen references to “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004).

“Jessica,” helmed by Vaclav Vorlicek, has just been released on DVD (facets.org).

* Thanks to Lee Pfeiffer for sending copies of Cinema Retro, of which he is editor-in-chief. It comes out three times a year and is, says Pfeiffer, “the first major magazine dedicated to films of the 1960s and 1970s.”

The current issue, No. 6, includes 11 pages on the original “Casino Royale” (1967). A remake, with Daniel Craig as James Bond, is due out Nov. 17. For more on the mag, go to cinemaretro.com

* You say you can’t get to the Istanbul Film Festival in Turkey? Try the next best thing, the New York Turkish Film Festival, unreeling through Saturday at the Village East (Second Avenue and 12th Street). nyturkishfilmfestival.com